EXHIBITION > Charlie Hunter: Montana Songs
Old Main Gallery
Bozeman, Montana
oldmaingallery.com
September 13–October 3, 2024
Charlie Hunter’s solo show at Old Main Gallery this season is titled “Montana Songs,” which may come as a surprise to some of his fans. “Montana is not my home,” he admits. “I am from Vermont, where a great 19th-century exodus westward did occur, but to Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Still, Montana’s Big Sky landscape thrills me, and the struggle written upon it nevertheless rings true. My work uses the hollowing-out of small-town and rural America as the stepping-off point for explorations of form and texture, and goodness knows there is plenty of that in Montana as well as Vermont.”
Hunter is renowned for near-monochromatic scenes in which the thin, semi-transparent paint film allows his quasi-random mark-making to appear almost photographic in detail. “I strive for my paintings to reside in an uneasy calm, halfway between a photograph and a dream,” he explains. This is achieved through a variety of unorthodox materials and techniques, including water-miscible oils, which allow for certain watercolor techniques, as well as traditional oils.
He uses a window-washer’s squeegee to manipulate paint and provide extremely sharp edges; their juxtaposition with lost and softened ones, combined with careful drawing and attention to value differentials, allows for multiple narrative illusions. Hunter is also known for impressing the pattern of paper towels into a painted surface in order to evoke the halftone screens and Ben-Day dots of photographic reproduction.
The artist was raised in rural Vermont and studied art at Yale University before diving into the music industry, where he created tour posters for such acts as Bob Dylan and the Jerry Garcia Band and managed acoustic artists. Since 2003, his company, Roots on the Rails, has organized music trains across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, which Hunter juggles alongside his full-time painting career.
Hunter will lead a plein air painting workshop at Old Main Gallery on September 14.
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In the instructional video “Breakthrough Designs for Landscapes with Charlie Hunter,” see how to make paintings that tell stories, create excitement, and are packed with drama.
Take a look at some of Charlie’s amazing work in the video above, and visit PaintTube.tv to learn more about “Breakthrough Designs for Landscapes with Charlie Hunter.”
